Myocardial Contrast Agents – Safety Considerations and Clinical Efficacy in Stress Echocardiography

Transthoracic echocardiographic examination is known to be a safe, non-invasive and reproducible method, used in every day clinical practice to obtain important information about cardiac structure and function. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of studies have highlighted the considerable technically difficultly in producing diagnostic images due to a poor acoustic window and more than 33% of patients undergoing stress echocardiography have suboptimal echocardiographic images. All these limitations have led to the use of contrast agents to improve the quality of standard ultrasound examination to provide a better delineation of left ventricle endocardial borders or to obtain information that cannot be achieved by using standard echocardiography, such as assessing myocardial microcirculation and therefore perfusion. This paper sought to review the clinical efficacy and safety of ultrasound contrast agents focusing on stress echocardiography.